AUG
10
2010
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Visual Changelog: Marble 0.10.0Marble 0.10 was released on August 10th, 2010. It is part of the KDE 4.5 Software Compilation. In the good tradition of recent years, we have collected those changes directly visible to the user. Unfortunately we were a bit late with our visual changelog for the release. So please enjoy looking over the new and noteworthy:
Do you want to plan a bicycle tour in the nearby wood? Need driving instructions to get to an address in a foreign city? Besides searching for places, Marble can now display possible routes between two or more of them. Places to travel along can be entered using search terms (e.g. addresses) in the new Routing tab on the left. Of course Marble also allows you to input them directly on the map. Routes are retrieved using OpenRouteService and displayed on the map. Turn-by-turn instructions are displayed on the left. You can customize the route using preferences like transport type (car, bicycle, foot). An arbitrary number of via points can be added easily: Use either search terms or create stopovers quickly and conveniently by dragging them out of the existing route and dropping them at the desired position. While a real-time navigation mode is scheduled for Marble 0.11, you can already export the route in the GPX format now. This feature is handy for using routes in conjunction with your navigation device or other software.
For normal usage, Marble downloads the map data that is needed on the fly in the background. It also saves the data that has been downloaded on the hard disc. Now imagine that you make a trip to Norway, and you don't know for sure whether you'll have internet during the trip. So you want to download the whole Oslo area in advance. Up to now this hasn't been possible. But with Marble 0.10.0 you can click "File->Download Region ..." and you get a dialog where you can specify the region and the zoom levels that you want to download. This feature was brought to you by Jens-Michael Hoffmann.
So far, Marble has had support only for displaying a single map texture on top of the globe. (The only exception was the cloud feature which allowed having clouds displayed on top of the satellite map. This, however, was hard-coded and not extensible.)
As described before, Marble has support for multiple layers now. Layers can get blended Lots of map data is provided on the internet on servers via the Web Map Service ("WMS") protocol. Bernhard Beschow has added initial quick and dirty WMS support to Marble. This means that there are now a huge number of maps that can be easily displayed using Marble. With KDE 4.5, we have completed the first step toward mobile platform support: Marble will show a slightly different and simplified UI on the N900 Maemo platform compared to the desktop. For KDE 4.6 we aim for an even better user experience and improved performance. For more information please visit the Marble Garage Project. Next stop will be the MeeGo version for Marble. This is one of our first more specialized Online Service Plugins: The APRS plugin created by We are still looking for programmers who would like to create more Online-Plugins: e.g. Twitter, News, Earthquakes or a social network plugin. It's easy to do and there's an Online Service Plugin tutorial available on our website that shows how to do it. In addition to these major improvements, our Marble developers have worked on several other small features, bug fixes and performance improvements:
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Comments
Marble and proxy?
Call me pedantic but i am trying marble from KDE SC 4.5 with my office http proxy server. When I choose openstreetmap, i don't see any map at all. Just a light blue globe with no detail, despite zooming in to the highest resolution. Of course, I have searched the city first (Sydney, Australia) so there's no chance i am zooming in somewhere in the middle of the Pacific :)
Point is .... does marble work with proxy? I have tried setting proxy server both in marble's configuration as well as KDE's global proxy settings. Nothing seems to work. No routing either.
Maybe not the place to say this but KDE should now aim to get office and/or proxy friendly. All corporate environments use some sort of proxy server!
Re: Marble and proxy?
Hi,
The user interface of Marble is misinstructional here: In the Marble settings an "http://" is suggested in front of the proxy domain. However this doesn't work in all cases (IIRC it does for some). Just enter the domain name instead. So instead of
http://proxy.company.com
please enter
proxy.company.com
I guess this would make your proxy work. And we need to fix this in Marble (again) indeed.
Update: I've just committed a fix which would stop suggesting "http://" for trunk and Marble 0.10.0 release.
sorry, looks like i posted my
sorry, looks like i posted my reply as a new comment: in short, yes that worked but can't get routing working yet (Australia).
QGIS
Talking about your WMS's implementation, did your team had a look to qgis ? It's in Qt, it's GPL, it has a lib, a c++ and python api and support WMS-C, WFS, etc.
Re: QGIS
Thanks for your suggestion. We know about QGIS. The fact that some application is opensource often enough doesn't help much with creating the same feature in a different application since the interna are usually very different.
In the case of QGIS the license is even different (GPL vs. LGPL) which wouldn't allow us to transfer code without permission for a license change to LGPL.
Thanks
Yes, that worked. I can see the openstreetmap view now. Thank you.
Routing is still an issue though. I am in Australia. Has routing support been added for this region yet?
Re: Thanks
Hi Kanwar,
Unfortunately ORS routing is restricted to Europe. But the next version of Marble will have worldwide and offline routing. See:
http://nienhueser.de/blog/?p=137